One of the most common uses of a computer system is to display electronic documents. Contemporary computer systems and programs provide flexibility in viewing a document, including jumping to hyperlinked locations in the document, zooming in and out of displayed content, allowing a user to jump to a desired page by indicating a desired page number, and so on. Furthermore, when the document contains more content than can be displayed in a viewing area, the computer systems and programs further provide scroll bars and scrolling methods to navigate through the document.
Conventional scroll bars are used for scrolling to portions of documents not shown in the viewing area. In a conventional scrolling method, in response to an instruction to perform a scroll operation, a linear content scrolling displacement process (such as that shown in FIG. 1) is applied. Thereby, a user can scroll through the content of the document. That is, in the conventional scrolling method, a scroll amount “ai” is directly proportional to a scroll input unit “k”. The scroll amount “ai” is also related to a total size of the document. When the total size of the document is small, the scroll amount “ai” is assigned with a small value; otherwise, the scroll amount “ai” is assigned with a large value. For a small document, the resulting movement (namely scroll amounts) may appear to be slow; whereas, for a large document, it may be appear to be fast. Consequently, many users find that precision scrolling is difficult with this kind of linear scrolling control.
What is needed, therefore, is a fast and effective content scrolling system and method for quickly obtaining the specific portion or content of interest to the user.